I-KCKT allows dissection-free RNA profiling of adult Drosophila intestinal progenitor cells II

The adult Drosophila intestinal epithelium is a model system for stem cell biology, but its utility is limited by current biochemical methods that lack cell type resolution. Here, we describe a new proximity-based profiling method that relies upon a GAL4 driver, termed intestinal-kickout-GAL4 (I-KCKT-GAL4), exclusively expressed in intestinal progenitor cells. This method used UV cross-linked whole animal frozen powder as its starting material to immunoprecipitate the RNA cargoes of transgenic epitope-tagged RNA binding proteins driven by I-KCKT-GAL4. When applied to the general mRNA-binder, poly(A)-binding protein, the RNA profile obtained by this method identified 98.8% of transcripts found after progenitor cell sorting, and had low background noise despite being derived from whole animal lysate. Examination of the intestinal progenitor transcriptome using PABP CLIP.